6 INTRODUCTION At 4 30 am on April 12 1861 Confederate artillery in Charleston South Carolina opened fire on Fort Sumter which was held by the United States Army The bombardment set off a savage four-year war between two great geographic sections of the United States One section was the North 23 Northern and Western states that sup ported the federal government The other section was the South 11 Southern states that had seceded withdrawn from the Union and formed an indepen dent government called the Confederate States of America The struggle between these two combat ants is generally known as the American Civil War although it sometimes is also referred to as the War Between the States The secession of the Southern states in chrono logical order South Carolina Mississippi Florida Alabama Georgia Louisiana Texas Virginia Arkansas North Carolina and Tennessee in 1860 61 and the ensuing outbreak of armed conflict were the climax of decades of growing sectional friction over slavery Between 1815 and 1861 the economy of the Northern states was rapidly modernizing and diversifying Although agriculture mostly smaller farms that relied on free labor remained the domi nant sector in the North industrialization had taken root there Moreover Northerners had invested 6
A map of the major battles of the Civil War shows that most of the battles took place in the Southern states Many people today see the war as the central event of American history heavily in an expansive and varied transportation system that included canals roads steamboats and railroads They had also put money into finan cial industries such as banking and insurance and in a large communications network that featured 7 INTRODUCTION
8 THE CIVIL WAR inexpensive widely available newspapers magazines and books along with the telegraph By contrast the Southern economy was based principally on large farms plantations that produced commercial crops such as cotton and that relied on slaves as the main labor force Rather than invest in factories or railroads as Northerners had done Southerners invested their money in slaves even more than in land By 1860 84 percent of the capital invested in manufacturing was invested in the free nonslave holding states Yet to Southerners as late as 1860 this appeared to be a sound business decision The price of cotton the South’s defining crop had skyrocketed in the 1850s and the value of slaves who were after all property rose correspondingly By 1860 the per capita wealth of Southern whites was twice that of Northerners and three-fifths of the wealthiest indi viduals in the country were Southerners The extension of slavery into new territories and states had been an issue as far back as the North west Ordinance of 1784 When the slave territory of Missouri sought statehood in 1818 Congress debated for two years before arriving at the Missouri Compromise of 1820 This was the first of a series of political deals that resulted from arguments between proslavery and antislavery forces over the expansion of the peculiar institution as it was known into the West The end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 and the roughly 500,000 square miles 1 3 million
INTRODUCTION 9 square kilometers of new territory that the United States gained as a result of it added a new sense of urgency to the dispute More and more Northerners driven by a sense of morality or an interest in protecting free labor came to believe in the 1850s that bond age needed to be abolished White Southerners feared that limiting the expansion of slavery would deliver the institution to certain death Over the course of the decade the two sides became increasingly polarized and politicians less able to contain the dispute through compromise When Abraham Lincoln the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party won the 1860 presi dential election seven Southern states South Carolina Mississippi Florida Alabama Georgia Louisiana and Texas carried out their threat and seceded organizing as the Confederate States of America The Civil War focuses primarily on the war itself its major battles campaigns and military leaders and the cost and significance of the conflict
